Black Friday

We are not crazy shopping types, so we really had no plans to do any true "Black Friday" shopping. In fact, almost all of my shopping has been done online this year. I did stay up late Thursday night and spent time Friday morning taking advantage of various cyber deals. My biggest tips include signing up for ebates.com and checking retailmenot.com for coupon codes.  Adam did end up doing his own version of Black Friday shopping, since he was up early anyway, he decided to walk over to Alco. They advertised a boys' red Schwinn 16" bike in their ad and when he arrived at 6:47am, they had 2 left in the store (and no crowds to be seen).  The associates even helped him take it out of the box to see if it would be a good size for Ryan. He purchased the bike and was back in the house by 6:56am! It truly was a great deal--about half of regular price and over $40 cheaper than the Toys 'R Us ad, plus a $10 off coupon to use next week.  We hope Ryan will like it, even though he may need to grow into it a bit.

My mom came over to help me paint the nursery and we had two coats of tan paint on by 1:30. I then started an ambitious project to paint a tree mural on the wall of the nursery (see full post) and we did some other projects around the house, like order a new dresser for the nursery and move the old dresser into our master closet. We also finished decorating for Christmas! Our decorations are mostly just two trees, stockings, a nativity scene, and some shelf rearrangement, but as busy at the Christmas season is going to be this year, it's okay that we won't have an abundance to put away.

It was really nice to have a whole day at home to get a lot done (and we'll just choose to forget about the mountain of things I could have done at work) and as sore as I was from painting and decorating, I'm glad I didn't add shopping to the day's activities...that can wait until tomorrow!